Africa down the valley of the
Nile, past Ethiopia to Egypt; we have seen kingdoms arise along the great
bend of the Niger and strive with the ancient culture at its mouth. We
have seen the remnants of mankind at Land's End, the ancient culture at
Punt and Zymbabwe, and followed the invading Bantu east, south, and west
to their greatest center in the vast jungle of the Congo valleys.

We must now gather these threads together and ask what manner of men these
were and how far and in what way they progressed on the road of human
culture.

That Negro peoples were the beginners of civilization along the Ganges,
the Euphrates, and the Nile seems proven. Early Babylon was founded by a
Negroid race. Hammurabi's code, the most ancient known, says "Anna and Bel
called me, Hammurabi the exalted prince, the worshiper of the gods; to
cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked, to prevent
the strong from oppressing the weak, to go forth like the sun over the
black-head race, to enlighten the land, and to further the welfare of the
people." The Assyrians show a distinct Negroid strain and early Egypt was
predominantly Negro. These earliest of cultures were crude and primitive,
but they represented the highest attainment of mankind after tens of
thousands of years in unawakened savagery.

It has often been assumed that the Negro is physically inferior to other
races and markedly distinguishable from them; modern science gives no
authority for such an assumption. The supposed inferiority cannot rest on
color,[35] for that is "due to the combined influences of a great number
of factors of environment working through physiological processes," and
"however marked the contrasts may be, there is no corresponding difference
in anatomical structure discoverable."[36] So, too, difference in texture
of hair is a matter of degree, not kind, and is caused by heat, moisture,
exposure, and the like.

The bony skeleton presents no distinctly racial lines of variation.
Prognathism "presents too many individual varieties to be taken as a
distinctive character of race."[37] Difference in physical measurements
does not show the Negro to be a more primitive evolutionary form.
Comparative ethnology to-day affords "no support to the view which sees in
the so-called lower races of mankind a transition stage from beast to
man."[38]

Much has been made of the supposed smaller brain of the Negro race; but
this is as yet an unproved assumpt